Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Woodkid - Run Boy Run is a music video and song by Yoann Lemoine. The black and white imagery is amazing with rich epic adventure. Frustratingly, there is very little to explain what the story might be about, leaving it up to the viewer to determine the meaning for themselves.

There is a bit of a Where the Wild Things Are influence mixed in the mystery with the boy among the monsters. The video is actually part two of an ongoing story of sorts.

The Kingdom of the Keys
The Woodkid wakes up from the spell entrapping him in a prison of his mind where he was just a student in a mundane magic-less world. Only vaguely realizing the sacrifices made to bring him back to this world, he knew he had to get moving.

Appearance: Humanoids
made of materials found in woodland nature- moss, tree-bark branches,
etc. The head and face are often constructed from the skull of other
animals. Horns and antlers are often made from branches, etc.

Sight: Creatures made from materials from the woods.

Sound:
Voiceless. When on the move the sound of rustling leaves can be heard.
When these creatures move en mass, it is quite thunderous.

Smell: A fresh light mossy oder, like the edge of a swamp.

Touch: Sticks, moss, grass, wood, tree-bark- because Mossmen are made of these materials.

Attitude: They are devoutly loyal to the Woodkid. In his service they will.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Apathy Games has an interesting setting for the Savage Worlds game system called the Temporal Probability Agency which deals with wibbly wobbly timey wimey alternate realities and changing the course of events, etc. The game is designed to be able to be run with very minimal prep- even for Savage Worlds. Very high production quality. It's very cool and I wish there were more coming out for the game. What I think I liked the most, though, was the stat block format introduced in the game.

Running with this idea, I built a stat block based on the Apathy Games TPA stat block with LibreOffice for use with my own Savage Worlds projects. It turned out pretty close to theirs. This example uses the pre-generated character, Irina "The Skirt" Gregorovna from The Chase and The Moscow Connection from the Deluxe rule book.

I like the aspect of the five senses for the GM. Of course, I had

to embellished the character a bit to fill those parts in.

Here is the blog post introducing the stat block style. There is also interesting discussion about why some of these features were put in.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

This is not my own conversion. This is about the various conversions that are already out there.

The official Star Wars game belongs to Fantasy Flight Games these days. There is almost a retro feel to the Edge of the Empire game so far as it focuses on the original trilogy era. There are aspects of the game that also feel like the first Star Wars RPG from West End Games (see below). Special dice and beautiful production value- more about it here.

Wizards of the Coast had the previous versions, the latest being the Saga Edition. Squarish books, variant d20 system. Preceding Saga were a more direct d20 versions, much resembling d20 Modern and Spycraft. Seemed to have a pretty successful run.

As mentioned above, West End Games produced the first Star Wars RPG as well as some of the very first Expanded Universe in a dry era for Star Wars merchandise- in an age where we thought that was it, no more Star Wars to come. I believe it saw a couple of editions using the d6 system. Still remains a favorite and served as an RPG gateway for many of us.For Savage Worlds

Savage Worlds is designed for high pulp action which seems to be a very good fit for Star Wars. There have been several conversions for the Savage Worlds ruleset of varying detail and quality. All of them are home made and none of them are official. While each are for the most part individual project, there seems to be a collaborative spirit throughout with each conversion building on the previous.

Jon "Red 24" Woodland's conversion is 12 pages and looks to be last updated in 2005. He credits Tobia (see above) for some of the inspiration in this work and the WEG version of the game. Here is his site.

John "Sheriff288" Brown's conversion is 81 pages and contains a strong variety of artwork from various Star Wars sources. The document is laid out in a familiar two column design. There is a great NPC and NPC Wild Card chapter.

Brown thanks the previous converters- Rorschach and Red 24. He also gives thanks to Ted Arlauskus who

blog - which has dated info about an upcoming Starships and Vehicles supplement.

Mike Glanville's Star Wars conversion is the biggest and the most recent. In a way all of the previous versions are here. While many are true conversions (of d6, d20, or Saga) this appears to be a strait to Savage Worlds from the source material, according to the author's notes.

I initially decided to create a conversion guide that referenced the best parts of the existing conversion settings (with a few rules of my own). The harder I tried, the more Irealized it was not working. So I decided to go a different direction.Inspired by the Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s Companion series, I began to write a companion-style guide for adapting Star Wars to Savage Worlds.